Bruce Gilden
“I have always said that a street photographer should smell of asphalt and grime.”
In 2015, Bruce Gilden left Brooklyn for Beacon, NY. It was time to take a step back, to look back on several decades of work. He headed to the countryside after 35 years of living in New York City – that city whose filthy, crash and vibrating streets now exist only in movies and on the pages of photography books. In move, thousands of negatives and boxes of contact sheets resurfaced. Images the photographer never took the time to edit or work through.
“Lost and Found” is an unfiltered dive into the early work of the great Magnum photographer. It’s the mid-1970s. Gilden doesn’t use color film or flash yet, an aesthetic that will later come to define his highly recognizable style. “At the time, I was not at my best,” Bruce Gilden remembers. “I was in my thirties. I was broke, anxious and on drugs. I nearly died from an overdose. I had taken up photography without any real expectations. And for four years I drove a cab for a living ... ".
In these early photographs we can already see Gilden’s signature emerging, “devouring” New York “from top to bottom, passing by Eighth Avenue, Ninth Avenue, Delancey Street, 34th Street, Queens and Brighton Beach from time to time on Saturday mornings.” We feel the embodied and complete proximity to his subject. “I have always photographed from very close up,” the photographer notes. “Though when I was just starting out, I integrated more of the urban environment into my images in order to feel the city’s vibrations more than the passerby’s heartbeats. "
In Gilden’s streets, New Yorkers all look the same: broken, grainy and scarred by this city, "which exudes energy, speed, anxiety and stress". "I always thought I would have done a great job at photographing the streets of the 1920s and 1930s, when most men wore hats and smoked a lot ..." Cigars and cigarette butts, tramps and business men, balding combovers and big 70s disco hair, raggedy coats and pleated pants. All these fragments coexist in Gilden’s strange photographic sketches, tucking away mysterious details and clues for the audience to find.
“I would really like for the viewers to imagine their own stories in my photographs. This implies that the public understands what is expected of them. It's not always easy, because on the street most people won't see what I see.” Who is this woman screaming inaudibly inside a telephone booth? “Even if she was screaming for help, no one would be able to hear her or help her because she is locked in this box. Around her the city is crumbling, but no one is paying attention."
The New York City that Gilden captured now only exists in his photographs. “I don't believe that in my later work the city ever played such an important role as a backdrop. But in those days New York City was so vibrant, that I integrated it into the images. Today the city is dull." Now only these fascinating testimonies remain, captured by a photographer on the streets’ front lines.
“The strength of my images lies, I believe, in the fact that I photograph what I know. From the very beginning, I have been interested in marginalized people, alcoholics and drug addicts – not ordinary passersby. What interests me in people is their photographic appearance."
